After my Macbook pro failed last year and it’s internals were replaced, I didn’t bother with putting windows back onto the laptop. Recently though, I’ve realized I did need some form of windows on the laptop. I gave virtual box a try but running windows inside of virtual box was rather slow and not exactly what I wanted. So I decided that I’d need to put windows back on through boot camp.

While I was deciding this this course of action, I realized if I was about to go about destroying my partition tables, I might as well see about getting some form of Linux on the machine as well. You know… for science. I decided to go with Linux Mint. Mainly because I like the word Mint and Ubuntu has too many ‘u’s in it for my tastes. (And Mint is a bit more new user friendly)

This led me to the fabled triple boot system. Now doing a bit of research into this, it seemed that putting all three operating systems on wasn’t going to be as easy as simply telling each one to install. It eventually got to that point, but not the first three times.

One factor that made this triple boot up a little more complex was that I wanted to put in a storage space that all three operating systems had access to. I’m not very familiar with boot loaders, tables, mbr, efi and everything else, so this became an adventure. But the basics of the complexity boiled down to this: The macbook will only see four main partitions. To get all three operating systems plus storage partitions, you need five main partitions. This is a small problem.

But wait! Three + One doesn’t equal Five! Correct! Mac creates another partition when installing the mac OS that it uses as it’s own boot loader. This counts as a main partition. Surprise!

Now for added fun, the Internet informed me that I could skip boot camp on the mac side, and make the partitions myself. Since I was installing everything from scratch anyway, this seemed like a good idea.

At this point I didn’t know anything about what I just posted above. Since boot camp used windows XP SP2 I went with that the first two rounds. I never made it to installing Mint as I got stopped at windows XP.

The third time around I decided to give Windows 7 a chance, which worked beautifully, and discovered that windows thought my storage partition was empty space wanted to put in a volume and format it! I worried about it but continued on. I installed Mint and still couldn’t see the storage partition, only the mac OS could for some reason. At this point, I began looking into what was wrong since now I had an idea of what was wrong. And then I managed to nuke Mint somehow.

Now I learned how to properly partition my drive and how to properly install everything. (There is a trick apparently.) Once more the drive was wiped, and partitioned again. I installed Leopard, then Windows, and finally Mint with baited breath. This time everything worked as intended and my storage drive is available to all.

There is a worrying moment while booting Mint that makes the screen look like it exploded yet… Booting is funny as now here are two different boot menus I need to get through (rEfit and Grub) and there may not be much I can do about that.

So far, everything still works and I didn’t break anything (yet) this time around. Let science begin!